Today PolicyCast welcomes two guests who were among the first experts to try to bring the wild world of cryptocurrency under the supervision of the U.S. financial regulatory system. Timothy Massad, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at HKS, is the former chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and one of the first regulators to establish jurisdiction over crypto. Professor Howell Jackson is an expert on financial regulation at Harvard Law School, and a former consultant to the Securities and Exchange Commission when the SEC made its first attempts to wrap its regulatory arms around the blockchain world. Also known as digital assets, cryptocurrencies have been around for more than 15 years, and in that time, they’ve been derided by critics as a purely-speculative asset with zero intrinsic value. Meanwhile, the blockchain that supports them has been criticized as a climate-change-exacerbating energy hog and a technology w...